Happy Fourth of July. Here's some quiet fireworks for you. We try to avoid the noisy ones here at home because of the trauma to the animals, and sometimes me! We also volunteer a lot with the local animal shelter and it gets clogged every summer with animals who've gotten scared and run away from their homes because of all the firework noise. Be aware of pets if you're doing fireworks, please!
Yesterday was July 2 and the birthday of my brother Steven Scott Seward, I'm sure he spent it being as awesome as always! Tomorrow is the 4th and the birthday of my stepson, Michael Bach-Lesak. In fact there are a number of friends of ours who celebrate their birthdays around now. If you are one, give yourself a hug from us!
I haven't been to one in ages, and I'm sort of out of the loop, but the annual Adams reunion was usually held in, I think, Alief, TX on July 4th. Also next Sunday, July 10, 2016, is the annual Millard/Salyer reunion in San Gabriel Park in Georgetown. It used to last from about noon till 4 or 5 pm in times past. Last few times I went I got there about 12:30 and everyone was leaving already. Tough to socialize in July without A/C I suppose!
I've been in a bit of a quandary these days concerning online genealogy. I've been exploring WikiTrees . I love the concept. Everybody loads up their own tree and ultimately they all connect to make one massive tree with everyone on it. They put a lot of work into it and I like it. Their messaging feature is a bit wonky, I find it difficult to see who is doing what in my lines. Also, I have so much data and the site only takes it in small amounts, so I wind up splitting my .ged files to upload them, then rather laboriously matching and merging to link everything together, but it's still a worthy effort.
I also have online family trees posted on Ancestry.com, MyHeritage, FamilySearch, and probably several more I don't remember right now. All have their selling points (in fact most are selling you their sites, of course) The problem is each one wants to be the only place for you to go for your family tree. I prefer to do my main family offline on my laptop. I actually store my main data on Dropbox, but still use my venerable PAF program to enter and display the data. (PAF is no longer being supported by anyone, but it still works very well for my purposes. I haven't found another that I like as well yet.)
So, the trick is, how to keep all the different trees synchronized. All are pretty statically fixed at whatever the tree was when I originally uploaded them. The options are to manually update each and every one every time there is a change, or basically delete the whole tree and re-upload it, which in some cases messes up whatever links others may have established. As far as I can tell, there is no main standard, other than the aforementioned .ged files.
I have seen and used programs that link, say, all my social accounts together. I can post one comment and have it synced to Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and whatever other site is the flavor of the month. If there were one Genealogy program that would do that. Let me keep it updated and it would synchronize with all the other sites I wish it to. That would be worth changing from PAF for. I've let all the other sites slide for the time being while gradually updating WikiTree.
Maybe it should work the other way. Do all your work on one of the online trees and have it able to sync back to your laptop, for backup purposes if nothing else. I DO NOT want everything to be just online. There are times when I need to access something and wifi is just not there, take for instance the above mentioned family reunions, or the need to print various reports.
I find the prospect daunting and I don't even work at the genealogy all that often.
Relatively speaking, of course!
